50 Books / HT50, Part 8: 2010-2012
This installment of the 50 Books / HT50 series is entirely devoted to novels and features two deftly comic tales, a searing depiction of Stalin’s gulag, a finely wrought drama set in occupied Japan, and an Appalachian story of beauty, climate change, and personal evolution.
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Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Bite by Bite is a nourishing, lyrical sampler
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest book, Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees, offers a veritable smorgasbord of flavors and a multi-course menu of memories. Nezhukumatathil will appear at Novel in Memphis on May 4, and she’ll be in conversation with Margaret Renkl at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 7.
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Nancy French’s memoir recounts her journey of faith, love, and politics
Breakups are hard — in some cases, dangerous. Ghosted: An American Story is conservative writer and activist Nancy French’s account of her split with the Republican Party following its embrace of Donald Trump and the harassment she and her family subsequently experienced.
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Amy Tan turns her discerning eye to the avian world
With The Backyard Bird Chronicles, novelist Amy Tan has put fiction aside in favor of drawing, observing, and pondering the multitude of birds that find refuge and refreshment at her California home. Tan will discuss the book at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 10.
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Historian Aram Goudsouzian edits a hilarious memoir by the late sportswriter Stan Isaacs
Stan Isaacs stood at the forefront of a group of offbeat sports journalists in the early 1960s, at the start of an influential career that spanned half a century. A decade after Isaacs’s death, Memphis historian Aram Goudsouzian has masterfully edited Out of Left Field: A Sportswriter’s Last Word, a collection that works as both memoir and a showcase of great sportswriting. Goudsouzian will discuss the book at Novel in Memphis on April 29.
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Poet Jenny Qi on what shapes her work
FROM THE CHAPTER 16 ARCHIVE: The child of Chinese immigrants, Jenny Qi entered Vanderbilt at 16, lost her mother while she was still an undergraduate, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in biomedical science while pouring her grief into poetry. Her award-winning debut collection, Focal Point, explores sorrow, death, and what we owe to each other.
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